There have been a number of attempts at generating a mathematical definition of a system, dating back to at least Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s now classic book, General System Theory, published in 1968. The systems engineering community would benefit greatly from such a definition, which would define a system precisely in …

Systems engineers and systems architects have many architectures of which they need to be aware: there’s the architecture of the system-of-interest (or system under design), the architecture of the larger system in which the system-of-interest must operate (the context system), and the architecture of the enabling system (the enterprise or …

Last time, in Part I, we discussed what emergent behavior is, where it ultimately originates from, and why unintended emergence is hard to mitigate when not caught early. We also introduced the Cha-Cha-Cha investigative approach utilized primarily in the scientific community and tailored it for use in systems engineering and …

Part II of this series may be found here. Acclaimed systems thinker Donella Meadows has defined a system as “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.” David Peter Stroh has elaborated upon this definition of a system to note that systems achieve …